I may be the only person on this wide, wacky Internet who went into my first play of Castlevania Judgment with a great sense of optimism, and when I begin this first thirty by saying I took some quick punches to the gut, keep in mind it’s for a very stupid reason.

It seems that if you have a Gamecube controller plugged into the first Gamecube controller port on the Wii when you start Castlevania Judgment, the game assumes you’re playing with a Gamecube controller and blocks every other type of input, including the Wii Remote that you’re holding because you just started the game. I know that this isn’t a hardware limitation, because it doesn’t work that way in Super Smash Bros Brawl, but I feel I must point out that I had no idea why I couldn’t play my game until I actually opened the intimidating tome of an instruction manual and saw that the Gamecube controller is one control option on the game. That’s when my mind realized what was going on. I unplugged the Gamecube controller and was able to use my Classic Controller without issue.

From there, it was smooth sailing, until I reached Grant Danasty, but I’ll get back to that in a second.

You’re given a small handful of characters to play in the game to start, but if you’ve got a DS and Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, you can unlock Shanoa, that game’s heroine, immediately, as well as Aeon. It’s not clear why Aeon is unlocked by Order of Ecclesia, though there is a character named Aeon in the game he doesn’t at all match the Aeon character in Judgment. Have I spoiled something for myself that I missed on my complete playthrough of Ecclesia? Unlocking Shanoa quickly is fortunate, because she’s already my favorite character in the game, though I haven’t unlocked anyone but these two. In the first thirty, I tried the training for a little while, played through Shanoa’s version of Story Mode (this is a series of 1P vs CPU battles with an extremely weak storyline behind it), and poked around Accessory Mode, which lets you equip various accessories on your characters in the game.

This game is all about fan service, and I’m loving it. I faced off against the cast of Castlevania III in sequence, which was glorious. Each character had background music that was strongly associated with them in the game, and it sounds fantastic. Grant Danasty was the first challenging battle, taking several tries, but man was it ever fun. So far, I’m very pleased with the game. It does a reasonably good job of recreating that 3D Castlevania feel from Lament of Innocence or Curse of Darkness but in a fighting game, which works pretty well. On top of that, it looks really, really good. Not really good as in you think it’s on a PS3, but really good you know it’s not on a PS2. If you have a Wii, you know what I’m talking about.

Watch for the review, I’m going to take this game apart.